Intel Nehalem operating with 8 cores, 16 threads

From Intel’s perspective, Otellini said that Nehalem is a very modular design, and from the developers’ standpoint, it’s also very dynamic too. He said that developers will be able to turn cores, caches and threads on and off. Nehalem will launch with an eight core product in 2008, however each core will have two threads, making a total of 16 threads on a single CPU package. The design was completed just a few weeks ago and will feature 731 million transistors. Glenn Hinton, Chief Nehalem architect and Intel Fellow, said that Nehalem is a higher performing design than the Core architecture. His team spent a lot of time improving single threaded performance and, in order to enable this, the design has a very strong focus on power efficiency – so much so that it’s even more efficient than the Core microarchitecture.